By Diego Morra
It has become too taxing for TV viewers to hear the shrill but pathetic line of arguments by the defense lawyers of Vice President Sara Zimmerman Duterte before the Senate impeachment court. For one, it is doubtful whether lead defense counsel Sheila Sison and her 15 colleagues crafted the legal theory Sison discussed in her opening statement for the simple reason that Sara’s signature is there for all to see. Aside from denying everything on their client’s behalf, the defense warned the senators not to fiddle with Sara since she was elected by 32-million digital voters and must be accorded due respect.
It is not a defense at all for it is a silly argument consistent with Sara’s lie that she did not do anything wrong. Sino ang idol ni Sara? Si Donald Trump at ang handler nito, ang nasirang Roy Cohn, who failed to argue his case against the AIDS virus. If the client insists on having her way, and the defense team failing to convince her that the Senate, and the larger court of public opinion, is not buying her theory, the only logical, decent and smart thing to do is resign.
Or her lawyers can simply admit before the impeachment court that Sara is not competent to stand trial owing to her mental troubles, and that she has great difficulty processing reality. In France, that leads to a thorough examination of the respondent, as in the case of Louis Althusser, and prosecutors may just say *non lieu. They will not prosecute due to the psychological state of the accused. Jacques Lacan was Althusser’s analyst. Yet, that option is certainly not in the best interest of Sara. **C’est parfait! While Sara has a fraught relationship with reality aside from bungling with her grammar and corrupting logic, she has not retreated from her obsession that her god has groomed her to be the president of this benighted republic.
However, with the weight of evidence adduced by the complainants, secured from official documents from the COA, Department of Budget and Management (DBM), the Office of the Vice President (OVP) itself, the Office of the President (OP), the Philippine Army (PA), the Department of Education (DepEd) and local government units (LGUs), the NBI and other investigative agencies, it is practically impossible for the defense to secure a ***nolle prosequi from prosecutors. The issues have been joined and no matter how the defense works, its theory that “vox populi, vox dei” should be the basis of any Senate decision. Of course, this doesn’t wash but Sara is not concerned about the facts, the evidence and the universal condemnation of what she has done.
Sara herself demanded a bloodbath and mistakenly quoted the verses from William Henlety’s “Invictus” to show that she is being persecuted and mauled only to be victorious in the end. Henley suffered a debilitating disease, his extremities amputated but he soldiered on. Sara? She mauled a court sheriff, issued threats against former Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV and threatened to kill Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his wife as well as former Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez. Rephrase Mark Antony’s eulogy on the funeral of Julius Caesar as written by William Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones…” The same holds true for the evil that women do.
On July 14, 2026, Bastille Day, Sara issued a one-page statement on the impeachment trial, saying in gist that the proceedings are bogus and typical of kangaroo courts. What she cannot say before the trial court, she dishes out in truncated English to assail the prosecutors for persecuting her. At the trial, the issue discussed was the death threat against the Marcos couple and Romualdez, whom she cursed. “On Day 4 of the impeachment trial, the country witnessed what I have been saying all along: The complaint is not supported by evidence.” (Emphasis supplied.) Thus, she denied issuing the death threats on the video footage her camp produced and which her defense did not debunk. Sara is her best hostile witness.
“Repeatedly claiming that there were threats where none existed, inventing an assassin where there was none, and fabricating evidence to support those claims does not (sic) transform fiction into fact. Instead, such actions undermine the integrity of public institutions, erode public trust, waste public resources, and corrupt the search for truth,” Sara argued. These sentences should be taken as proof that Sara does not believe in her own declarations, has contempt for the truth and has no truck with sincerity, honesty and morality. They prove that Sara swims in Duterte’s DNA.
Sara then takes the bully pulpit and proceeds with her stream-of-consciousness message: “An impeachment proceeding should be grounded in credible evidence, not speculation, manufactured narratives, or unsupported allegations. The rule of law depends on facts, not fiction.” Are we going to believe a woman who has confessed that she lies as a matter of course, misquotes Bonifacio to show that a little learning is a dangerous thing and who denies her own video, her felicitations to Ramil Madriaga, a guy she doesn’t know, and manufactured a horde of paid informers to enable her to spend P125-million in 11 days? By the way, Sara was not entitled to a single centavo in Confidential Funds (CFs) from July to December 2022 since the budget she was misusing was still the Robredo OVP budget. Robredo had zero CF from 2016 to 2022. #
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PHRASES OF THE DAY
Non-lieu (French) – A decision taken by an investigating judge to dismiss a criminal case during the judicial investigation phase.
C’est parfait (French) – “That’s perfect” or “It’s perfect.”
Nolle prosequi (Latin) — Legal term meaning “to be unwilling to pursue”.
Vox populi, vox dei (Latin) — “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”
